Google AMPs up Mobile Search Results

This last week has been a big one for Google. Hot on the heels of the dramatic change with AdWords, Google announced it’s killing off Google Compare and has started to roll out AMP pages in mobile search results.

As we’ve previously discussed, AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages, is the open source initiative from Google to speed up the mobile web and is Google’s response to Facebook Instant Articles.

At this stage it doesn’t look like AMP pages in mobile search results has rolled out to NZ yet. However here’s what AMP results look like on Google.com.

AMP results are readily identified by the green lightning bolt symbol with AMP next to it, as shown above.

The early adopters of AMP have been news publishers, such as The New York Times and The Guardian. At this stage it only looks like AMP pages are being returned in Google for news-related searches on mobile devices.

Why should you care?

With the launch of AMP search results many people running non-news websites, such as ecommerce sites, are asking if they too should be jumping on the bandwagon and start creating AMP versions of web pages. A reasonable question to ask, given the hype Google has given AMP plus the fact that WordPress, which powers one in four websites globally, is rolling out a plugin that creates AMP pages.

Until there’s more clarity about where Google intends to take AMP, our view at this early stage is that it’s probably not worth doing so unless you are generating news articles.

And even if you are, we don’t yet have any indication when or if Google will roll AMP into google.co.nz news results. Google.co.nz gets a lot of the innovations Google rolls out, but certainly not all of them — for example, Google Shopping Product Listing Ads are available in many countries, including Australia, but not NZ.

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